By: Andrew Boeres, Wittenberg University student and Cengage intern
The majority (77%) of current and former college students, like myself, are worried about having the skills needed for post-graduation in their careers. To reduce this worry, the Cengage Unlimited Career Center can not only help find careers that students want after graduation, but also help develop the soft skills that employers are searching for.
The best part about these activities and resources: I can complete them on my own time, and at my personal convenience. It’s a tremendous advantage being able to prepare myself for the professional world while juggling my schoolwork, social life and other responsibilities. Some of the specific topics I use are organization & planning, communication, and interview preparation.
Organization & Planning
All students will agree that planning is necessary for academic and professional success. Semester long projects, homework assignments, and the amount of studying required for exams needs to be planned out effectively to achieve the goals you set for yourself. The course (of many courses) I benefited the most from was the ‘How S.M.A.R.T. are Your Goals?’.
In ONLY ten minutes, I obtained a wide set of skills over creating, measuring and timing I need to achieve the goals I set for post-graduation. Going into my senior year, I now have a 6-month plan of what I need to do to be successful.
Interview Preparation
The ability to answer job-specific questions is essential to an interview. Knowing how to ask the proper questions will benefit your students even more. In the Career Center, there are multiple courses that teach students how to ask interviewers the proper questions and enable students to find the perfect career fit for them. When obtaining my internship, I used these courses to help determine the questions I needed to ask for my needs:
- How will this internship provide me with the experience I will need in a full-time career?
- What personality types work best in this environment?
- Will this internship support my personal goals?
I learned from these courses that the interviewers aren’t just interviewing me, but I am interviewing them as well. From my experience, I can confidently say there is no considerable place to learn interview skills like the Cengage Unlimited Career Center.
With the Cengage Unlimited subscription, your students will be able to access a universe full of academic and career preparation resources from one dashboard. On top of all that, they can access the Career Center in the same application as their course material. In my 4 years of college, I haven’t been offered a resource that provides me with this many opportunities to prepare for post-graduation. In the upcoming school year, my professors will also be able to recommend me the courses they feel will help strengthen my soft skills, and what will set me up for an incredible career.
Learn more about the Career Center and other perks that come with a Cengage Unlimited subscription here.
